


the faculties of the skull no longer admit

by fallencrest



Category: X-Men (Movies), X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014) - Fandom
Genre: Angst, Drug Use, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Post-X-Men: Days of Future Past, X-Men: Days of Future Past Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-08
Updated: 2014-06-08
Packaged: 2018-02-03 21:28:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,079
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1757471
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fallencrest/pseuds/fallencrest
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It isn't easy keeping it together, having hope. Charles uses the serum to stop the voices, stop the dreams, but it doesn't make it easier. (Only makes it harder, really.) Erik notices. Erik acts.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the faculties of the skull no longer admit

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted [here](http://xmen-firstkink.livejournal.com/11912.html?thread=22774408) at the kinkmeme, for a totally anonymous anon.

Charles gives up sleeping the night he projects a nightmare through the whole mansion and Hank shakes him awake, unsteady himself, and says in halting uncertain words that he thinks Charles showed that to everyone, to the kids and the adults, to the innocents and the things the war returned less than innocent. 

Oh, Charles thinks, and then he panics, and then he makes them all forget.

Hank looks at him like he's not sure why he's there and Charles knows he shouldn't have, knows the dangers of wiping the slate clean, but no-one's crying and no-one's screaming and no-one remembers what it feels like to watch a man shoot your mother because you couldn't move a coin without touching it. 

Charles sends out a wave of calm that he isn't even sure he ought to be able to conjure right now and says, “Go back to bed, Hank. I just had a bad dream.” And Hank smiles and acquiesces, leaves without a single doubt about the fact that everything's okay and Charles hates himself a little for it.

 

He gives up sleeping and he starts up drinking and it's barely a week before he starts up taking just the smallest dose of serum every night, just enough that he can't hear them when he sleeps and they can't hear him, just enough that he can take one stumbling step into the chair each morning but not a single step more. 

In the mornings, sometimes, his powers make thoughts translucent as fogged up glass or spatters of words half-audible on a badly tuned radio. He doesn't mind. 

 

He doesn't mind at all until Hank shakes him awake in the night and watches eyes wide in shock and awe and a disgust Charles can read without any preternatural ability as Charles stands unassisted and pulls on clothes ready to face whatever fresh hell has broken upon them. 

Charles watches every little thing that he should have been able to stop, should have been able to fix, and feels as he sits in a chair he doesn't need like a fraud and a failure and a man undeserving of the people who've banded around him like his beliefs are worth something. 

It shouldn't have escalated to violence. He should have stopped Erik's accomplices in their tracks and talked them down from this petty mutiny, sent them back to Erik knowing the wrong of what they did. Instead, violence, violence which should have been avoidable, would have been avoidable, if Charles had been a better man. (He catches himself thinking “if Erik had been a better man” but knows that evasion for what it is and that he cannot lay his own failings at the feet of another, however tempting it might be to do so.) 

 

He supposes he shouldn't be surprised that Erik comes to him after. Erik is an intelligent man. Erik knows when something isn't quite as it should be. 

When Erik comes, striding through the front doors in front of everyone, he's still wearing his costume like it's battle armour. 

He takes off his helmet like he's throwing down a gauntlet as he says, “I tried to send you a message – but I don't think you were listening.” 

Charles knows what he means as well as Hank does, Hank who excuses himself from Charles' office and leaves. (And Charles is grateful, for all that Erik didn't make his entrance a secret, that in the office, here and now, there is no-one else there to hear Erik say that and catch the poisoned silver of his tongue.)

Charles argues, defends himself for all he knows how far he's gone beyond the point of righteousness, and then he breaks. 

He breaks apart, pathetic and tired for all that he's sacrificed in trade for easy sleep. His voice shatters and pulls apart as he says “I couldn't sleep, and I couldn't stop.” He looks Erik in the eye when he says, “I don't want this. I never asked for this, Erik. I can't help everyone and I can't pretend I don't know what they need and I-” 

And he comes up short because Erik is there and Erik is looking at him not like the adversary judging his position and calculating his next move but, instead, with a sadness and a concern which speaks of someone Charles didn't think he knew anymore. 

Erik says his name like it's an offering to bridge the chasm rent between them by years and ideologies, “you don't have to fix everyone,” he says, like it's nothing, “and you can control it.”

Charles swallows back a lot of things then, bitter things about how he could have fixed Erik, how he wanted to, only he couldn't in good conscience do the things he'd maybe have to do to make that happen. And how, god, if he'd only done it, if he'd only made Erik forget the ills done to him, unpicked a little of the pain, sewn the wounds up right to reduce the map of scars, couldn't he have saved them all this? 

He swallows back an absurd urge to laugh and a pitiable urge to cry and instead he says the words “I could,” closed off and final because he could once but he can't now and he can't go back, none of them can ever go back. 

Erik says “you can” again and it really is an offer. It really is an offer to do for Charles what Charles had done for him once: to try to give him control and peace and make him into the man he ought to be. And Charles tries not to think what a bitter failure that was and will be again, wants to spit venom and truth both at once but Erik's hand on his shoulder brings him up short. And it's not the hand so much as the bleed-through that goes with it, the edge of Erik's mind permeating his with a feeling Charles hasn't experienced for long enough that he doesn't quite recognise it.

Charles doesn't say any of the things he wants to say, but can't bring himself to say the things that Erik wants to hear either. So he sits there, obstinately silent, refusing to meet Erik's eye, trying to ignore the way he's trembling just a little; until Erik goes to pull his hand away and Charles reacts, reaches up to stop him, catches hold of Erik's hand, doesn't look away.


End file.
